Larger table areas are being set up at the count venue of Clacton Leisure Centre so the long ballot papers can be verified, sorted into piles and then counted.
Voting takes place at polling booths across the constituency, external from 07:00 until 22:00.
The first ballot boxes are expected to arrive 10 minutes after the polls close. With the constituency consisting of rural villages and seaside towns, the last ones should arrive by 23:30.
Records have already been broken for this election:
Some 79,785 people are registered to vote in this by-election. Of those, 10,716 have already received a postal vote.
In 2024, the general election result for Clacton was announced at about 04:00, but there were only nine candidates then.
This by-election result is not expected until between 05:00 and 07:00 because the count process is expected to be slower with the longer ballots.
